Viewing AIDS Writings Through Prism of Hope

By DINITIA SMITH

Published: January 13, 1997

KEY WEST, Fla., Jan. 11—
''Will AIDS and AIDS literature soon be forgotten?'' the writer Edmund White asked. ''Will we admit that neither the virus nor the fiction and poetry and memoirs and plays and essays it has inspired are inescapable, ineradicable, unforgettable?''

Mr. White was giving the keynote address at the Key West Literary Seminar on Literature in the Age of AIDS over the weekend. It was called the first conference ever to be devoted entirely to AIDS literature, and it was a paradox that it was being held just as new treatments were beginning to offer the possibility that one day death from AIDS might cease to be a threat.

Since the beginning of the epidemic in 1981, there has been an outpouring of literature on AIDS: plays like Larry Kramer's ''Normal Heart'' and Tony Kushner's ''Angels in America,'' the memoirs of Andrew Holleran, the poetry of Mark Doty. But now that the new treatments are being tried, what will happen to all this AIDS literature? Will it be forgotten, relegated to the domain of advocacy and to a distant historical moment?

This was the question that could not be answered, but would not go away, through three days of panel discussions and speeches. More than 300 people -- gay writers like Mr. Kushner and Mr. Kramer, healthy-looking young women with H.I.V., mothers who have lost children to AIDS, doctors who treat AIDS patients -- had come to Key West, ''the poetic island,'' Mr. White called it, of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and of ''our Prospero,'' the writer James Merrill, who made his home here.

Key West has always been a legendary pleasure ground for gay people, but in recent years it has become a place where they come to die, drawn by its soothing climate and its excellent AIDS services. Now they were coming to talk about a ''cure,'' to listen to debates and even, for some, ''to flirt,'' as Mr. Kushner put it.

But this was a conference that seemed to be haunted by the specter of death. Its keynote speaker, Mr. White, has had H.I.V. since 1985 and reminded the audience that he lost his lover to AIDS in 1994. Mr. Kramer is H.I.V.-positive. And over and over during the three days, the names of dead writers were invoked.

On Friday morning, a panel assembled at the San Carlos Institute, a center for Cuban culture here, to talk about whether AIDS literature is really a separate genre. The panel included the novelist Anne Beattie, the poet Rachel Hadas and Michael Denneny, an editor at Crown Publishers.

Certainly, Mr. Denneny said, AIDS writing is defined by ''its overwhelming autobiographical form,'' by its main topic of illness and of dying. ''It's almost politically incorrect,'' he said, ''to have the AIDS novel be about surviving.''

AIDS writing is not a separate genre, most participants agreed. It is closely akin to the Greek elegy, to the plague writing of the Middle Ages, to Holocaust literature.

Inevitably, there were passionate responses from the audience. At one point, a man stood up and said: ''You draw parallels between the AIDS epidemic and the Holocaust. The Holocaust was an act of political extermination, but AIDS is a disease. A virus has no morals!''

In the Friday afternoon panel on ''Advocacy and Literature,'' the question was raised whether AIDS writers had crossed the boundary between literature and advocacy. Is it possible to make art out of something as compelling, immediate and life-threatening as AIDS? Most panelists said they were proud to be advocates. The poet and playwright Jewelle Gomez said, ''I read Charles Dickens as coming from a spirit of concern about poverty and the legal system in Victorian England, so I know that great artists can be advocates.''

At a panel on ''The Novel and AIDS'' that same afternoon, the novelist David Leavitt said he had begun to use his work as a forum for advocating safe sex. ''I always try to include a reference to the sound of a condom wrapper being torn open,'' he said. Still, Mr. Leavitt said: ''A writer is not a journalist. He can't be expected to be, otherwise it is not art.''

Many writers at the conference identified Mr. Kramer as the ultimate AIDS advocate, and their hero. When Robert Dawidoff, a professor of history at the Claremont Graduate School in California, and the moderator of the panel on ''Advocacy and Literature,'' first read Mr. Kramer's writing, he said, ''it was like the Continental Congress.''

Mr. Kramer prickled at the praise. Indeed, at times, the conference seemed to weary him altogether. ''I don't know why I'm basically here,'' he said. ''Except my lover and I wanted a free trip to Key West. I get very nervous when I hear words like literature and art connected to AIDS, celebratory words. We don't have much to celebrate yet.'' He said he was skeptical about the prospects for a cure.

And as for the subject of AIDS literature: ''Has the form of American literature been affected by AIDS?'' Mr. Kramer asked, rhetorically. ''No. It hasn't.''

Of all the writers -- poets, short-story writers, playwrights -- it was the novelists who said they had the most trouble integrating the subject of AIDS into their work. Ms. Beattie, whose short story on AIDS ''The Second Question'' appeared in The New Yorker, confessed that she had tried to keep the subject at bay because of its immensity. ''I failed miserably in many, many first drafts,'' she said, ''because of the hugeness of what's in front of me. I was worried that anything I would do would be taken as metaphoric.''